As Dog Is My Witness Page 4

  Chapter Seven

  On the way back home, I called Barry Dutton in his office. The Midland Heights chief of police was between meetings—one with our mayor and council, and another with a group of area rabbis who wanted him to report any Orthodox Jews caught speeding on Saturday, when they were barred from getting behind the wheel of any car, speeding or not.

  Strikingly, he still chose to take my call. “Aaron, I’m not going to send a patrol car to follow Leah home from school every day. I’m not. The child can walk the three blocks on her own.”

  “If it was your daughter . . . I began.

  Barry rumbled, which I took for a chuckle. “My daughter,” he said, “is a six-foot-one black woman and can kick the ass of anyone who gives her trouble.”

  “Could you send her to follow Leah home from school?”

  “What do you want, Aaron?”

  I had to be delicate about this, because Barry is a sensitive guy. The two other times I investigated a murder, he felt my participation was—shall we say?—inappropriate. In fact, he thought I should “stick to writing about which DVD player is cooler than the others.” Because the proper presentation here would be extremely important, I decided it’d be better to ease into the subject.

  “I’m investigating this murder . . . I began. I actually heard him drop the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Aaron,” Barry said after picking up the handset. “I thought you said something about investigating a murder. And I’m sure you couldn’t have said that, because I remember telling you the last time that if you chose to do that again, the next murder you investigated would be your own.”

  “This is different.”

  “The last time, you said it was ‘different.’ And I ended up sending two officers to cut you out of a chair you’d been duct-taped to in a hotel in New Brunswick. So don’t tell me it’s different.”

  “I wasn’t in any danger, was I? Besides, this is an Asperger’s thing. Lori Shery wants me to do it.” Lori once spoke to the state association of police chiefs about AS people getting involved with the criminal justice system, and she had so wowed Barry, he was offering to instruct a course for his officers by the end of the same week.

  He knew when he was trapped. “Lori?” he asked tentatively.

  “Yeah. And you don’t want me to tell her you called me off, do you?”

  He groaned, which sounded like Darth Vader having an asthma attack. “What do you need, Aaron?”

  “How well do you know the chief of police in North Brunswick?”

  “Not very. Her name is Les Baker.”

  “Her name?”

  “They’re very progressive in North Brunswick.”

  “Cool.”

  Barry’s voice showed concern. “Is this about that guy shot with the old gun?”

  “Yeah. The kid they picked up for it has AS. He’s into guns, but his mom swears he doesn’t own any.”

  “The fact that they found the gun in his room might indicate otherwise. Did you tell your mother everything you were doing when you were twenty-two?”

  “I don’t have Asperger’s. They’re not incapable of lying, but most of them are really bad at it.”

  “You probably did tell your mother everything you were doing when you were twenty-two.” Barry is a nice man, but he can be a real pain when he puts his mind to it.

  “Anyway,” I sighed, “I’m guessing you don’t know Chief Baker well enough to call her and put in a good word for me.”

  “Which word would that be? ‘Irritant?’ ‘Problem?’ ‘Obstruction?’”

  “You’re a nice man,” I told him, “but you can be a real pain when you put your mind to it.”

  “That’s exactly what I could tell her about you,” Dutton said, his chuckle rumbling again. “If you want me to.”

  I hung up on him. It gives me a certain feeling of power to do that to my local chief of police, no matter how much he’ll make me pay for it later.

  The cell phone rang a minute or two later. I checked the incoming number, but didn’t recognize it, so I opened my phone.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was female, but authoritative. “Aaron Tucker?” “Depends. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Chief Leslie Baker of the North Brunswick Police Department.”

  Barry Dutton worked fast. “In that case, yes,” I said. “This is Aaron Tucker. I guess Chief Dutton called you.”

  “Yes,” said Baker. “And he said to tell you he should have left you in the chair with the duct tape. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No,” I answered. “Chief Dutton hallucinates sometimes.”

  “Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Tucker?”

  “I’m writing about the murder of Michael Huston. Can you spare a few minutes?”

  She exhaled, not meaning for me to hear it. While North Brunswick is a much larger town (with therefore a much larger police department) than Midland Heights, Baker was probably not used to dealing with murder investigations, or the publicity they usually generated. But she knew it was part of her job.

  “I suppose so, but it’ll have to be quick. Where are you?”

  I gave her my location, and she directed me to the North Brunswick Municipal Complex on Hermann Road. Because I’m a trained investigative reporter, this immediately made me wonder whether the road had been named after Bernard Herrmann, who wrote so many memorable film scores for Alfred Hitchcock films. There was no way to know, so I put that out of my mind. But the music from Vertigo kept running through my head.

  It took but a few minutes to get there, and after twice getting lost in the building, I found myself in Chief Leslie Baker’s office, which was not only larger than Barry Dutton’s, but also had carpeting. I made a mental note to inform Barry of these salient facts at my earliest convenience.

  Chief Baker herself was a tall woman, about five-foot nine or ten, and in full uniform, she appeared to be roughly the size of the Empire State Building. She was on the phone when I walked in, but hung up and stood ramrod straight, shook my hand with a grip that could have turned my hand into a maraca had she given it full force, and pointed me toward a chair. She was nothing if not physically impressive.

  “Lieutenant Rodriguez is working on the Huston case,” she told me almost immediately. “But since Chief Dutton requested I speak to you, I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

  I took the reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket—they are designed specifically to fit on your butt or in an inside jacket pocket, but I’m not classy enough to wear a sports jacket—and opened it to a blank page. Baker did not blink.

  “What led to the questioning, and eventually the arrest, of Justin Fowler?” I asked.

  Baker opened the file on her desk. Behind her, I noticed, was a picture of her shaking hands with one of the former presidents I hadn’t voted for. I tried not to hold it against her, and then saw a picture of her shaking hands with a former president I had voted for. Apparently, she was a bipartisan hand-shaker.

  “According to Lt. Rodriguez’s report, once we discovered the kind of firearm that had killed Mr. Huston, Mr. Fowler was initially questioned as an expert on antique weaponry. But after the officers entered Mr. Fowler’s residence—with his permission—and discovered the weapon in his bedroom, the arrest was made.”

  “You’re aware that Mr. Fowler has Asperger’s Syndrome?”

  “Yes,” Baker noted a space on the report, then closed it to keep it from my gaze. Reporters are notorious for being able to read documents upside-down. She didn’t know, of course, that trying to do so usually makes me woozy. “I’m not terribly familiar with the condition, but Lieutenant Rodriguez did note it, and explained very briefly what it means.”

  Baker, I could tell, was trying to be fair, but she didn’t want some wiseguy reporter busting into her office and screwing up her case, no matter how many police chiefs called her. But the swiftness of the arrest and the constant references to the file were making me suspicious. I didn’t thin
k anything sneaky was going on, but I had a hunch she wasn’t telling me something.

  “Among other things,” I said, “it could mean that Justin might confess to a crime he didn’t commit, if the interrogators made it clear that his confession would please them, or make them his friends. He might not have a very firm grasp on the consequences of copping to a crime he didn’t do.”

  “Are you his lawyer, Mr. Tucker?”

  “I haven’t even met his lawyer, Chief. But I do know something about Asperger’s. My son . . .

  “Chief Dutton told me about you,” Baker said. “I understand you have a personal stake in this. But the fact is, Justin Fowler had the gun in his possession and he confessed to the crime.”

  “What’s his motive? Why did he kill Michael Huston?”

  “He said he had just gotten the gun, wanted to see if it would work, and chose Mr. Huston completely at random.”

  I couldn’t help but curl my lip. “Oh, come on, Chief,” I said. “There are a hundred ways Justin could have tested out this weapon. He didn’t need to go out on a 10-degree winter night and shoot the first person he saw walking his dog. Asperger individuals might have poor impulse control, but they have to be provoked. There has to be an impulse to control. Your detectives put words in his mouth.”

  “Then explain how the murder weapon ended up in his bedroom,” Baker said. “A gun with no serial number, a gun for which there’s no record of purchase, and a gun for which there’s no license. Clearly an illegal weapon, and one that would appeal only to a collector, since it’s not nearly as powerful or efficient as anything manufactured today. Who else would choose to shoot someone with a single-ball deringer that has to be used at close range, Mr. Tucker?”

  “It worked for John Wilkes Booth.”

  Baker stood. “I don’t have anything else I can tell you. If you have further questions, you can direct them to Lieutenant Rodriguez.”

  “Can I see Justin Fowler? Can you get me in for an interview?”

  Baker’s lower lip twitched. “No need,” she said. “I just got off the phone with the county jail. Justin Fowler made bail ten minutes ago.”

  Chapter Eight

  Chief Baker could offer no explanation for Justin’s seemingly impossible bail-out, and I had no time to go back to Mary Fowler’s house—I was needed at home.

  Other men might have considered the investigation of a murder to be more urgent than being in a chair behind a desk when a nine-year-old girl and her twelve-year-old brother got home from school. I’m proud, however, that I’m the one who’s been there pretty much every day since they started school. Besides, it gives me an excuse for never having cleared what, in a civilized culture, would be considered minimum wage.

  When I got home, Jeff Mahoney’s battered old van, the one he calls the “Trouble Mobile,” was parked in front of my battered old house. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the engine running, so the van’s heater wouldn’t turn off. His green uniform and green hat—with the logo of the rental car company whose vehicles Mahoney fixes on the road—were greasy, which is not unusual. The green hat was pulled over his eyes, and he was slouched back in the seat, which was unusual.

  I got out of the car, walked to the van, and knocked on the window, producing a muffled sound because, uncharacteristically, I was wearing gloves. Mahoney didn’t open his eyes, but he did take a sip of coffee. Then he sat up and looked, turned off the van, and got out. He wore no coat.

  “Mr. Tucker,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Mr. Mahoney,” I countered, showing off my originality.

  “I need you to follow someone,” he said.

  I looked up at Mahoney, who stands a good ten inches taller than me.

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “Well,” I said, “suppose I follow you into the house. You don’t have a coat on.”

  He looked surprised, but walked up the steps and waited for me to unlock the door. I thanked the powers of good for the invention of the radiator (I told you this was an old house) and took off five or six layers of clothing to look more like myself and less like the Michelin Man.

  Mahoney took a long sip from his jumbo coffee cup while I put water on the stove to make my favorite cold-weather companion, fat-free hot chocolate (French Vanilla). I know, it’s hard to have confidence in a grown man who drinks something called “Swiss Miss,” but trust me, I’m macho as all get-out.

  “Okay, I give up. How come I have to follow you, and where am I following you to?” Warren came in, intimidated by the large guest, but curious. Mahoney, without thinking, put down a hand for the dog to sniff, and within seconds was, as usual, Warren’s best friend. He scratched behind Warren’s ridiculously long ears.”

  Somebody’s sabotaging my work,” he said with a straight face.

  Warren and I stared at him. “Your work?” I finally said. “You fix rental cars that break down on the highway. How can somebody sabotage your work?”

  We walked into my office, which is right near the kitchen, an unfortunate coincidence that has helped make me the man I am today—the one who carries around an extra ten or fifteen pounds. I sat in the big swivel chair in front of my desk, and Mahoney paced next to what I laughingly refer to as the “client’s chair,” an old dining room chair we don’t have room for anywhere else in the house.

  “For the past three weeks, after I’m finished with a repair, someone has been tampering with the cars so that the repair is undone. They’re making it look like I didn’t do the work, and they’re screwing up my batting average.” Mahoney believes that the number of cars he repairs, and how well the job is done, appears in a box score in the newspaper every morning. He is determined to be the best at what he does, and thinks the rest of the world is hanging breathlessly on each repair he performs. It’s how he got to be the way he is, which is worth being.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t understand the process. You get a call from your company that a renter’s car has broken down. Is the customer there when you arrive?”

  “No,” Mahoney shook his head. “Usually, somebody at the company drives out with a replacement car, picks the renter up, then flags the original rental car so I can see it. Most often, there’s a rental agency near where the car has broken down, or at least nearer than I am, so the replacement car has arrived, and the customer has left, before I get there.”

  The teapot began to whistle, so I got up and we moved back into the kitchen. I took the hot chocolate box out of the cabinet after I turned off the water, and started to create a 40-calorie drink that would take my mind off how drafty and cold the house gets no matter what you do. I noticed that Mahoney didn’t make a withering crack about the hot chocolate, which was not an encouraging sign.

  “So how does the car get back after you repair it? You drive up in the van and fix the car. You can’t drive both the van and the car back.”

  “That’s right,” Mahoney said as I stirred my drink. Exhausted after the long trip from my office, I sat at the kitchen table instead of going back inside. Besides, once I spilled the hot chocolate, I could mop it up much easier in the kitchen. You have to plan ahead. “I call the office when I’m done, and they send out a car with two guys in it. One of them drives the car back. If the car needs a part I don’t have, I call a tow truck, and they tow it away.”

  I thought about that as Warren walked to Mahoney for another pat, and got it. “Do you stay with the car until the driver arrives, or is there a time when it’s repaired, but you’re already gone?”

  Mahoney stroked Warren’s head and the dog, in his quest to make people do all they can for him, lay down, forcing Mahoney to bend over and rub the dog’s belly. “That’s how it works,” he said. “There’s a short time when the car is there by itself. I can’t wait around for the driver every time—I have more cars that need fixing.”

  “So you think that if I follow you through your day, I’ll see whoever’s undoing you
r work.”

  Mahoney nodded. He kept rubbing Warren’s belly, because the dog was doing his “eye trick,” the thing where he looks as pathetic as possible to elicit sympathy. It always works, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it myself when dealing with Abby. “That’s how I figure it,” he said. “And since you don’t actually have a job . . .

  I raised one eyebrow, a trick I learned through years of watching Leonard Nimoy on Star Trek. “You have a funny way of asking someone for help.”

  “It’s not something I do often,” he admitted.

  “True. And I owe you about six thousand times over.”

  Mahoney, who had knelt down to attend to Warren, groaned as he stood, and threw a melodramatic arm across his brow. “I just want the nightmare to end!” he wailed, then looked to see if I was buying the act, which I wasn’t. Warren, who doesn’t deal well with raw emotion, got up and left the room. Hell, if nobody was going to rub his belly . .

  “You don’t know from nightmares,” I told Mahoney. “I’ll soon have to spend a week in this house with Abby’s brother and his family.”

  Mahoney winced and sat down. “Howard?”

  “The one and only.”

  “No way you could find a business trip to go on for a week?”

  Mentally thanking Leonard Nimoy, I raised my eyebrow again. “A minute ago, you said I don’t have a job. Now you want me to send myself away on assignment? Which is it? Besides, I just got back from a trip yesterday.”

  As briefly as possible, I filled him in on the exciting details of the trip to Hollywood (really Santa Monica), and my current assignment for Snapdragon (really Lori Shery).

  “So you have a rewrite to do that might finally jump-start your career, plus a murder investigation, plus Howard and his Yuppie version of a family coming to stay for seven fun-filled days.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “For a guy with no job, you’re pretty busy.”